The holidays are here and now it's time for everyone to take a well deserved break. Most of the DuckDuckGo Staff will be travelling for the holidays this week and next, so please be aware that we may be less responsive (or unresponsive) to email, GitHub pings, and the forum during this time.

Recently a new DuckDuckHack developer, @rHoover, reached out to us with an awesome idea for a Vermont Beer Trail Instant Answer. We realized that beer-related IAs in general were lacking, and we want to fix that. So, we asked @rHoover if he would lead an effort to build a few much-needed Instant Answers related to Beer and he has graciously accepted -- but we don't want him to do it all on his own -- we want the community to get involved and work together!

Before we created our own forum
here on the community platform, we were using 2 different domains for the community platform and the old forum:
- dukgo.com (community platform)
- duck.co (discussions forum)

Now that the entire DuckDuckGo community, forums, and ideas are consolidated here, everything can be operated on 1 domain: Duck.co
This makes sharing (and remembering) the DuckDuckGo Community much easier! Any old URLs will still work and forward directly to duck.co (e.g. https://dukgo.com/blog
will automatically go to https://duck.co/blog

Currently, this only involves the web platform, not the XMPP service. On XMPP, nothing has changed for you! The domain is still dukgo.com for the XMPP server, and we are working hard on making duck.co an available XMPP domain for your account too.

As part of the new userpage feature we offer, we also allow you the usage of the so called OpenID delegation. You might have already seen this as an alternative way to login on some websites. It has this OpenID sign:

Thanks to those of you that have spread privacy and DuckDuckGo, our traffic has nearly doubled in the last couple weeks. Many of our new users are coming from areas outside the United States and, as part of our ongoing effort to provide multiple languages, we need your help.

More translations, more management

In the last few weeks, I've worked hard to add a notification system to the community platform. It turned out that it was a visually complex topic, as we need to show those notifications for you on the web and also through email. Plus, we have several content types (and comments on those types), comments on comments, comments on comments on content types and so ;). It was getting complex and it required a massive cleanup to reach the point we have now! So, let me introduce to you to...

In this Blog post I'd like to say a few different things about the community platform: first of all, I would like to detail the technology underlying the platform, as well as how you can help contribute to it; secondly, I would like to explore possibilities for its future, and give a bit of information on its historical background; finally, I would like to explain a few of the business decisions behind its conception.